Q: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

A: Practice, Practice, Practice!

That little joke goes out to the three classically trained musicians who regularly read my blog.

You know who you are.

Even if you don't know who the other two are.

The point is I know who all of you are.

Moving along then...

Practice, in the form of rehearsals, seems to eat up my days and nights, lately. The vaudeville show enters tech next week. No surprise there. It was on the schedule. But I can look forward to long nights spent in a tuxedo, in a warm theater, sweating rivulets down my forehead, while trained comedian-types discuss the funniest possible way to stick a grown man in the butt with a hypodermic needle the size of an upright vacuum cleaner. (The funniest way? It's a giant hypodermic needle. Any way is the funniest way.) Last night was the first stumble-through of the show. The first time that we put the whole thing together. Running time? 4 hours. But that was with multiple long, stops to discuss something or try a costume on or locate a missing performer. And some bits had to be repeated. Our target time, which I think we can hit, is an hour and ten minutes. Very doable.

The process has been a wonderfully collaborative one. I've taken suggestions from other actors, the director, the stage-manager and the choreographer. (There is no writer to work with, since the skits are almost a hundred years old.) I've even brought my own bits to the table and seen my ideas incorporated into the final product in a very funny way. I also re-wrote one of the sketches, which got broken up and turned into two sketches and it's a delight to hear talented, trained actors and actresses eloquently nail my punchlines. I could get used to that.

It's also a VERY physical show. In rehearsals, I basically run around on the stage in a crazed, over-sexualized panic for three hours straight. People have commented that it looks like I've lost weight. Which is nice. I also got a pleasant surprise tonight, when I put on a jacket from last fall that was pretty tight on me then, to find it a little loose on me now. There's reason enough to finally get those gym memberships for me and Kyle. So there are additional perks to performing the show.

Also, there's a girl ... who .... well, there's no story to tell just yet. Let's just say that there's a girl. And I've noticed her noticing me and we're both noticing each other. I look forward to doing this show with her and getting to be friends with her. Maybe something else will come from that. Too early to tell, at this point.

Oh, and she's a full two inches taller than me. So THAT'S interesting.

In addition to the three weekly Vaudeville rehearsals, there's also Fugue rehearsals on Saturday mornings. We've had two of them now. Both at Gill Park. Full cast, both times. With Don there for both rehearsals.

It's different.

That's my initial reaction to doing this show. It's different. A different cast. (Well, except for me and Tony. And Don.) The form is going to roughly be the same, but Don's planning some silent scenes, underscored by music and some other sections that won't have any music at all. He's also broken it up into three sections. A beginning. A middle. And an end. Likely this is a reaction to the show's longer running time.

It's a different cast of performers, this time around. With the addition of Jamie and Harz (two talented improvisers that I've worked with before) and Regan (a guy that I knew, but have never seen him improvise before), everyone else is a total stranger to me. I knew Heather from TM shows, the last time around, but I've never actually hung out with her or played with her before. And all of the other girls are totally new to me.

Rehearsals are an unsettling mix of the familiar and the new, mixed oddly together. We do the warm up where you take ten minutes to get up off from the floor and I think, "Hm, this feels familiar". And then one of the girls in the cast says, without a trace of irony, "Oh Martha Stewart is my biggest hero" and I think, "Well, that's different." And then we do scenes under music and I think, "Well, this is familiar" and then two girls do a scene with NO emotional stake, about nothing, with nothing to do but interact with an environment that I CAN'T FUCKING SEE and I think, "Well, that's different." So, I waver back and forth, in rehearsal, between feeling like an old sea salt and a clueless tourist.

If I were to be totally honest, I would say, "I miss the original cast." I think we were all on the same level, with regards to our investment into investigating the form. And because none of us had ever done it before, we were all asking, "Can we do this?" together. Now, in rehearsals, I catch myself thinking, "this discussion isn't contributing to the process. This is actually Tony and Heather butting heads about improv theory. A discussion that they've likely had before at WIP." In the interest of full disclosure, I have also caught myself saying, "Well, I know from previous experience that the form..." and later felt like a tool for it. I was in the previous cast. They get it. It doesn't need to be said, again.

I have also decided that I'm not sexually attracted to any of the ladies in the new cast. Which is weird for me. The other show was... well... hot. Some good looking people in that cast. And more to the point, some people who knew how to carry themselves in a very sexy way. I don't see that in this cast. Well, not in the girls. They seem like girls, to me. Younger girls. And all that that implies.

So, I've scratched "make out with one of the ladies in the cast" off of my To Do list, which leaves "do some good, worthy improv", "look fucking hot in my suit each week" and "make out with Harz and/or Jamie" as the only other items on my "To Do" list.

All of this rehearsal for vaudeville and improv has completely taken over my life and has meant a deficit in another area... I haven't been to a Stinger rehearsal in almost a month now. I was in New York one Sunday, the Toronto the next, and have missed the last two Sundays to go rehearse the vaudeville show. Ironically, the last two rehearsals have been canceled too for absences. I have no idea what that means.

I miss my improv troupe. I want to be back in rehearsal with them. Once the vaudeville show gets up and running, I'll be able to make the first bits of Sunday rehearsals again. And four weeks after that, I'll be back onto rehearsing full time! It feels weird to be away from a team that I've been on for four years now, for so long. Maybe that's why I've been feeling so ungrounded, lately. My routine is a little bit fucked up.

Things will stabilize soon. The vaudeville show will open. I think it will do quite well. The theater is hosting a BIG gala on opening night as a fund raiser for the theater company. I'm looking forward to that. (I'll be drinking in my tux for the first time in my life. How very Bond-ish.) Once the show opens, I'll be back to "Fugue" rehearsals and Stinger rehearsals. We can turn our attention to the upcoming Stinger Halloween run. (Details pending.) And then the holidays, after that. Things return to normal.

Well, as normal as they usually are.

Merrily we roll along.
Mr.B


Carnegie Hall, circa the early 1900's.